


Artificial Paradise

by gudhvinr



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Loneliness, POV Second Person, Spoilers, The Fade, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-23
Updated: 2015-01-23
Packaged: 2018-03-08 19:18:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3220433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gudhvinr/pseuds/gudhvinr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What Solas saw when he returned to Wisdom's domain in the Fade, after the spirit's torment and death. Solas POV in the second person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Artificial Paradise

**Author's Note:**

> I got the title from a song by the band Hammock, [because their music is more beautiful than I can bear](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mab-jegql5M) and provided much of the inspiration for this piece. Listen while reading, if you like.

There is no one here to greet you now. Only the withered grove holds your memories, and your friend's, as bubbles hang in amber. This is the last place that you thought to find barren, but now the temple you saw rise forth from understanding has fallen to naught but ruined choirs. Once there was a man who sought to break the black encroaching walls, to make himself the very cloud of a storm that would crack all the rotten boughs of empire. Now, you are a mere wraith of who that man once flattered himself to be. Perhaps he, too, is dead.

You hoped against all reason that here, the friend you knew would still reverberate in but a subtler timbre, but that one is returned to sparks of being scattered on the winds of will.

You drink from the spring and its cold is bitter: no omens can stir now from the ripples of a murdered oracle. Around you, in all directions, falls a mist of motes of being that sweep into ephemeral shapes fantastic and alluring, but you do not heed them. Like vanishing stars, all things have wheeled about you, so altered in their constancy that your stomach shudders and leaps within your sleeping body.

You will remember this, no matter what comes: the moments unhooking from each other as you gaze at the frost-browned blossoms your friend once tended. The mist retreating before the sudden flare of Fade-sun in your vision, baring the empty seats where once the two of you sat to feast on the fruits of one another's knowledge. Still your friend's scent lingers here, ink cast upon a lily. Once there was a man whose heart could sing, but now you are robbed of voice.

If you could see Wisdom again, if your hands could touch, regret would mark you none the shallower. You have become an heir of dust. A raw sob tears from your throat, your teeth baring.

If ever you came here upon a festal day, shadow-birds would wheel about your head, and in the arc of their flight were written mysteries that you alone could savor, decipher, unVeil. Willows of wisps would remember the first word you read as a boy, their bark slow-dancing to form the script of your hand. About all was warmth, a lover's palm upon your breast, and in its touch the gentle damp of spring.

Now every tender blade of grass is turned to a needle of ice. A crippled sun drags down towards the false horizon.

When you think to sing at last, you are doomed to hear that the echoes alone give reply, in the famished language of the wolf.


End file.
